texasdiver

WTF? My kids do speak English. They are not immigrants. It's their first and only language. What we want to do is teach them some Spanish while they are young enough to absorb it fluently. I suppose you think spelling is an unnecessary burden on the school system too now that we have spellcheckers on every computer?

Heh, well, Houston maybe. Try that in Waco sometime. Here the politics split very neatly along racial lines and if you don't go with the mainstream people look at you with a mixture of surprise, horror, and curiosity. Like you are some sort of rare specimen they've heard about but never seen. People talk politics and religion here. It just doesn't even occur to them that you might not disagree. The question we get all the time from strangers as well as neighbors is "what church do you attend?" The idea that you might have other plans for your Sunday mornings doesn't register. My kid constantly gets church-related material stuffed in her backpack at school and she attends a local public school. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. It's part of the reason we are looking for a more interesting and diverse place to live. Because I get the feeling that we could live here for 50 years and still feel somewhat like outsiders.

Yeah, I meant it's reputation outside Texas. Over the past decade about the only time you ever heard Sugarland mentioned in the national news was to do with Tom Delay. If you grabbed 10 random but educated people from out of state and asked them about Sugarland I'd be willing to be all they would be able to come up with was Tom DeLay. Of course who am I to talk. I live in the Waco area. If ever there was a city with an undeserved distorted national reputation it's Waco. The whole Branch Davidian thing happened 20 miles out of town in a nowhere little spot called Elk. I've lived her 4 years and have never had occasion to drive within 5 miles of the place. Not once. No one in Waco had even ever heard of the Branch Davidians until they saw the whole thing happen on CNN with the rest of America. But since the nearest big hotels are in Waco, that's where all the national media did their reporting from.

Yes, I've lived in Seattle, Portland, and Washington DC so I know what a diverse and vibrant restaurant scene looks like. The problem with Waco is that most of the older people with money just want to sit down to a dinner of prime rib, baked potato and steamed vegetables at one of the local private country clubs, or have steaks at one of the many local steak houses. And the younger familes with kids seem content to pack into all the local chain places with the kids menus. The Chilis/Applebees/Outback/Olive Garden/Chedders/Red Lobster type places. So ecclectic restaurants, unless they are next to Baylor and cater to the student crowd, just don't make it here.

I expect the banks will qualify us for up to around the $500 grand range although I would be much more comfortable staying to a limit of around $300 grand and putting the paychecks to other uses like saving to put 3 kids through college and early retirement. I'm not naive enough to think that Houston real estate is a wonderful investment. I just want a nice place to live. We'll probably be looking for a 4-br place in the 2500-3000 sf range with a large yard for gardening and good schools nearby. I'm looking forward to growing citrus as the Waco winters keep killing my orange trees. So a decent-sized family-oriented house but definitely not one of those extravagant McMansion things that cost a fortune to climate control. Unless Houston is very much unlike the rest of Texas, I'm assuming that will put us in pretty much any of Houston's surrounding burgs and all but the most exclusive and posh neighborhoods in the central city.

Actually there is a decent Thai restaurant next to Baylor that is BYOB which I usually forget until I'm sitting down looking at the menu and then really wishing that I had stopped by HEB for some cold beer on the way there. But Ethopian? No way. I was in walking distance of 3 great Ethopian places when I was in grad school in Seattle and miss that. Waco also has no Indian, Greek, or Lebanese either. Which is hard to take because there are nights when I'm just dying for Tandori chicken, hummus, or gyros. The best chinese restaurant in Waco is the new Pei Wei Diner and the 2nd best chinese is the Panda Express so that tells you about the quality of the Asian food. The rest of the local chinese cafeterias put out food that looks about like the deli line at HEB.

I hear so much about the Woodlands that I'm curious and we'd like to take a drive-by visit our next time in the area. Unfortunately it isn't really on the way to anywhere for us because the fastest route to Waco is northest on 290 and then 6 via Cy-Fair and then College Station. Next time I suppose we can drive over to 45 and then head south and visit the Woodlands that way. Our friends live in Cinco Ranch. She commutes to Sugarland and says the drive is easy enough. He works out of a home office for a large engineering/consulting firm that is worldwide. He only goes into the downtown Houston branch about once a week for meetings so not a problem. We have not seen Sugarland yet either. I was initially turned off by the whole place due to the whole Tom DeLay thing, thinking that I'd never want to live someplace that would keep putting him back in office. Assuming it was just the land of mega-churches, strip malls, and crooked pols. But the more I read, the more interesting it sounds. The schools sound steller and it sounds like a far more diverse and interesting place than its reputation suggests. In the end, what we will most likely do is spread our net relatively widely through the most interesting and high-quality burbs in the Houston area and go with whichever place turns out to offer my wife the most opportunities for her medical career. It will be much easier for me to follow her than vice versa. One thing is for certain though, we definitely both plan to work and live in the same community and avoid the Houston-area traffic as much as possible. Especially as our kids are young and we want to spend our free time the next 18 years hanging out with our kids rather than stuck in traffic.

The Waco area is growing steadily but nowhere near the explosive that you are seeing in the western suburbs of Houston where new schools and subdivisions are popping up like dandilyons. It is a very central location for distribution type businesses to operate from because Waco is almost the geographic center between DFW, Austin, San Antonio and Houston. Most of the growth around Waco is happening in the southern and northwest suburbs where the good schools are and not the central core. There are 12 school districts in the greater Waco area. Four of them have good reputations, the others not so much. So you can guess where all the growth is happening. Waco is even getting some very nice master-planned communities. The nicest one in my book is called Badger Ranch in the southern suburb of Woodway: http://www.badgerranchwoodway.com/ It has the community pools, lakes, nature trails etc etc. The northwest suburbs is the China Spring area where my wife and I live. It is wooded rolling hills and horse ranches and pretty much like the hill country west of Austin. Some very large ranches and quite pretty countryside. Nicer than the area around Crawford in my book. China Spring is growing rapidly and we just passed a big new bond measure in May to build new schools, which is probably a familiar story down your way. Surprisingly, the Crawford area really hasn't taken off despite being the site of the Western White House for 8 years. It's still a little 2-bit town without much but farms and ranches. It's not ugly, but it's certainly not unique in any way. But no one seems to have been able to make much money off of being in close proximity to the Bushes. In all, the Waco area is pleasant enough. We are not unhappy here. The greater Waco metro area is maybe 250,000 or so. But it's not particularly culturally diverse. It's heavily Baptist, being the home of Baylor. And if you want to eat something more than steak, BBQ, tex-mex, chinese, or national chains you will have to look pretty hard.

BTW, what I've noticed about Houston (unlike Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio) is that there are quality towns, schools, and neighborhoods in just about every direction (except maybe east?). That makes it much more difficult for the newcomer but I think makes the Houston area more interesting. In Dallas, almost all the upscale development is concentrated on the north and northwest side from Grapevine to Plano. In Austin it's all on the west side and north side. In San Antonio its all on the north and northwest side. Houston though seems to have interesting neighborhoods and good schools spread all around a massive area.

My wife and I have been visiting friends in the Houston area over the past few years and are contemplating moving to the Houston area for a change of pace and better professional opportunities. We currently live in the Waco area where we moved to from Juneau AK for my wife's medical training. Since both of us are in professions that are widely distributed throughout Texas metro areas (she is a family practice doctor and I teach HS science and do environmental consulting out of a home office) we can pretty much chose any place to live with the idea of working nearby. All the fast growing suburbs in Texas have medical offices and schools popping up around them so finding employment should not be a major issue. Our idea is to focus in on a few areas that look especially promising and start making initial professional contacts and then if something good develops, especially for my wife, then we would eventually move on down. For her, the ideal would be a suburban area with a medical practice and hospital located very close by so that commuting is not an issue. Since there are schools everywhere, I'm not particularly concerned. We are both committed contractually to staying in the Waco area until Spring 2008 so we have plenty of time to look around and explore professional opportunities. We have three girls ages 1, 4, and 8 and are believers in public schools and so the quality of the local schools would be perhaps our #1 criteria. My wife also Hispanic and we'd love to raise our kids bilingual so English/Spanish bilingual schools would be a big plus. We also like outdoor recreation (running, biking, boating, swimming) and so a community with those amenities would be essential. I don't golf and am uninterested in the sport so we aren't looking for a golf community although it seems you can hardly avoid golf courses in Houston. I just don't want to live someplace that is expensive solely because it is on a golf course. The girls are getting very much into horseback riding and the older one looks headed towards doing it competitively, so I'd much rather live in a community that has stables and riding trails nearby (Gleannloch Farms has been suggested). Hope that's enough information to start. When you see these questions on the Houston forums, the first question usually asked is "where will you work" because commutes are so critical. For us, we intend identify a few ideal neighborhoods and then look for work in those specific areas with the idea of working and living in the same community. To date, the only suburban area in greater Houston that we are familiar with is Cinco Ranch where we have friends that we visit. My wife is very taken by Cinco Ranch, especially the greenscapes, pools, lakes, and amenities. And we like how the neighborhoods have so many kids and how people just sit out front in the evenings to socialize and watch the kids play in the street (at least on our friend's street in Cinco). Katy seems to fit most of our criteria. There are 2 new hospitals in Katy and new medical clinics forming all the time. And there are new schools being built everywhere. However the greater Houston area is obviously MUCH larger than Katy. So we're looking for a few more choice areas that are also worth considering. People have suggested Sugarland, Cy-Fair, and Woodlands to us also. But I'd be interested in what the rest of you recommend so I can put them on our "to visit" list for our next trip to Houston later this summer. We've also been looking at the DFW, Austin, and San Antonio areas but for some reason Houston just feels more like home than the others. Perhaps because it's so much more green and lush than the other cities and less overtly "Texan." Or maybe it's just because our best friends live there. But Houston feels like the "best fit"